ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how teachers and students read challenging texts by moving their meaning-making practices across expressive, arts-based mediums. It suggests that this process, which we call layering literacies through the arts, deepens students' complex thinking and elevates engagement. The chapter extends the practice of layering literacies through the arts with three additional books that we consider to be challenging texts. Arts-based strategies with challenging literature, taken as a whole, can be entry points for classroom learning about social problems and increasing critical consciousness. The chapter explores seeing the text with Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, being the text with Sharon Flake's The Skin I'm In, and feeling the text with Sonia Nazario's Enrique's Journey: The True Story of a Boy Determined to Reunite with His Mother (Adapted for Young People). Right from the title reference, Sharon Flake's The Skin I'm In calls us to think about embodied literacies.
